[UPDATED] That damn coach!
- From the Rayne (LA) Independent
(Credit: @JL_Reports)
What are they saying about this at the Rayne (LA) Independent?
“We’re very disappointed in it,” says Steve Bandy, general manager of the 3,600-circulation weekly.
The reporter responsible for it — a man in his 30s (“old enough to know better,” says Bandy) who has been at the paper for less than a year — “is very apologetic and very upset.”
“He just tacked it on to the end of the story and meant to change it after getting the stats. He forgot about it and turned in the story.”
The general manager says two other Independent staffers looked at the “10 or 12 inch story” before it went to press, but didn’t notice the “bullshit and laziness” line.
“One said, ‘I’m not really interested in sports and didn’t read the whole thing.” (Many Independent readers apparently didn’t get to the last sentence; Bandy says the paper only got a few calls about it.)
Will the reporter be disciplined?
“I’d rather not go into that,” says the GM.
UPDATE: Reporter Kade Seibold lost his job over this.
@JL_Reports And yes I indeed lost my job. Please call me 3156173
— Kade Seibold (@KadeSeibold) May 18, 2012
“It not fun right now,” Kade Seibold says in a phone interview one day after he was fired for his “bullshit and laziness” line. “I was writing the article and I was beginning to get frustrated because I didn’t have the proper information to write it that’s no excuse. I was wrong, but I think the punishment is very stiff.” (He correctly points out that others at the paper should have caught the passage.)
Seibold, 32, says he told the coach yesterday that he was sorry.
“She actually laughed at it and accepted my apology.”
He adds: “The community isn’t upset. … I was in the process of getting fired yesterday when someone called the newspaper office and said, ‘I want to congratulate who wrote that article because what he said was right.”
Seibold, who joined the Independent last August, is hoping to get his job back and “get a chance to redeem myself.”
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Just from skimming the visible part, it looks like there were many other mistakes.
Based on all of that, plus the writer’s response that someone should have caught it, it sounds like the writer should have been fired long ago, or perhaps never hired to begin with.
Also, upper management needs to pay a lot more attention to what’s happening in Sports. These kinds of problems seem to be ignored for long periods of time. Meanwhile, mistakes appear daily. Not a good way to manage things.
“One said, ‘I’m not really interested in sports and didn’t read the whole thing.”
If that person was supposed to read the whole thing, then add that person to the list of should have been fired long ago/never should have been hired.
This does highlight a problem with sports reporting. Newspapers can’t cover every game, especially for youth sports like soccer and Little League. Papers rely on coaches to report scores and stats.
It isn’t unusual for parents to want to see the information in the paper, but for volunteer coaches to skip calling in or faxing stats. There are coaches who will only report winning games. (No story? Then you know your grandkids were on the losing side.) In my experience, many youth sports coaches also don’t want to (or don’t get organized enough to) delegate the job.
Trying to get consistent reporting from coaches — even coaches paid by high schools — is hard, and the increasing tendency to expect coaches to report the information online so the sports department doesn’t have to do any of the work increases the burden on the coaches without giving anything in return.
High school and youth sports generate a lot of clicks and visitors for smaller papers. The fact that coaches, who are trying to coach, encourage their players, handle scheduling, deal with parents and more, also get frustrating with keeping stats and reporting them, should be no surprise.
FormerStaffer, those are definite issues.
But they have little to nothing to do with someone who apparently couldn’t write somehow staying on staff, while other people who were supposed to read copy decided not to read it because they “didn’t follow sports.”
These types of problems are not limited to small newspapers, either.
Whether a coach calls in stats has little to nothing to do with the entrenched laziness and apathy that lead to these types of results.
Rather than reading the story aloud, put on some headphones and have your computer read it to you, with you reading along. Most computers have “text to speech” capabilities that are easy to use, and they’ve saved my bacon a few times.
My only complaint is that he used “due to” rather than the correct “because of.” Other than that, with the attention newspapers give to editing these days, is anyone surprised that this happened?